Micro Monday

Tom Cutting, creator of the Stickman Diaries, talks about the winding path of his working life, including copying code for Pong to play with his brother, working in desktop publishing and the prepress industry, and eventually embracing the internet. He also talks about his favorite piece of tech, the iPad, and how it makes it possible for him to do art.

About Stickman Diaries:

One of the things I like about Micro.blog is that I don’t feel like I’m performing. If somebody likes it, they like it. I’m doing it really for myself, as a record of things. The nice thing about not knowing whose following you is there’s no number ticking up to make you think, ‘Oh no, I must get my drawing out this week, I can’t disappoint my viewers.’

Chris Wilson joins us on Micro Monday. He lives in Kraków, Poland, and works for an ad technology company, but he is originally from London, where he graduated with a degree in Politics. We talk about how his blog has evolved throughout this journey, which included teaching English in several countries, and how his podcast dreams are deferred while his infant daughter makes predictable quiet time a challenge.

This episode takes us to Finland to chat with Sven Seebeck, a blogger, a photographer, a musician and a music teacher. He’s been blogging since 2008, focused on a variety of topics. We talk about the difficulty of doing a music microcast without falling into the trap of perfectionism.

This week’s guest, Ben Norris, is a husband and father of six children (plus a new puppy), as well as being an iOS developer, a blogger and a sketchnoter. He has also written quite movingly about mental illness and healing, and we chat about that a bit.

This week, Annie Mueller is our guest. She’s a freelance writer who has recently relocated with her family to Puerto Rico. “I do the words,” her About page says. And she likes Micro.blog:

I feel that it’s less about me expressing myself, and more about being part of this conversation with other people who are making their own cool things. It’s a neat meeting of interesting minds, and creative, thoughtful people. I just really enjoy the conversations that take place there.

We kick off the New Year with Jack Baty, a long-time blogger and a partner in a digital development studio since 1995. He has a eclectic mix of interests that you might want to check out. The fellow pictured in his avatar with the pipe is not him, but it’s a cool story.

Micro.blog has become my favorite place to hang out online. And I’ve hung out in a lot of places online, so that’s saying something.

This year, New Year’s Eve falls on a Monday. It’s a good time to reflect on the past year, and in that spirit, this episode is a short retrospective of our first 10 episodes. If you’re new to the podcast, here’s a great starting point.

John Philpin has been blogging and microblogging for a while. Now he’s taking on a new challenge: microcasting. We talk about the similarities between microblogging and microcasting. We also learn about John’s People First project and how that influences his approach to the PeopleCast microcast and his other work.

Everybody hesitated about blog writing because they said, “Well, I’m not an author,” and then, bit by bit, it became acceptable to do whatever kind of blog you want, and I think that what’s happening now is that podcasting is going the same way.

The Omni Show, a podcast that features the people who bring you all the great software from Omni Group, just marked its first anniversary. The host of that show, marketing human Brent Simmons, joins us on Micro Monday to talk about what is special about this type of podcast.

It’s important to note that we’re not just getting the stories of people who could potentially be stars later. We want every story and every single person’s voice. I often think back to the punk rock ethos: kill all rock stars. The audience and the band should be interchangeable.

We also talk about his project, NetNewsWire, an app he first launched in 2002, sold to another company in 2005, and then re-acquired this year. That leads us to talking about RSS and Micro.blog, and what we hope to see in the future of the internet and social media.

This week’s guest, Chris Campbell, teaches film in Nova Scotia. He reviews a LOT of films on Letterboxd and also posts a photo a day to his microblog. His blogging life story starts on a server in Antarctica and has gone through several iterations before reaching his current setup, using SquareSpace and Micro.blog.

We’re back with another episode of Micro.blog Q&A with founder Manton Reece. Community members submitted questions, and we were able to get quite a few without turning this episode into a macrocast, including:
* Will you add post categories?
* Can Wavelength be used with WordPress-hosted podcasts?
* What are the plans for offering portability and back-ups of microblogs?
* What is the status of accessibility improvements?

Rich Anderson comes to Micro Monday, and we talk a lot about music. He’s hosted the podcast Crush On Music, he works in online marketing at the Metropolitan Opera, and he is a competitive air guitarist. We chat about all these cool things, plus microblogging and Mastodon. 🎸

After many years of producing tech-oriented blogs such as Mac Tips and KnowIT, Miraz Jordan has settled in at Micro.blog to post the “bits and bobs” that interest her. Her blog features a delightful combination of commentary, links, photos of the New Zealand coast north of Wellington, cute dogs, and even a runaway horse. Miraz also shares the custom CSS she used to format photos on her blog. She still likes sharing tech tips. 🙂

On this week’s episode, Jean chats with Daniel Jalkut, the developer of MarsEdit, the blogging editor for Mac. As co-host with Manton on the Core Intuition podcast for 10 years (🎉), Daniel has had a front-row seat at Micro.blog’s inception and evolution. We examine the multifaceted nature of Micro.blog, its dual nature as a business and a mission, and how we are still figuring where to put our social media energies.

This week, Jean talks to Aleen Simms, proprietor of App Launch Map, podcast host (Originality) and frequent podcast guest (The Incomparable), and a lover of fancy pens, inks, and journals. We avoid the temptation to talk about guinea pigs and kitties, and focus instead on where we find ourselves in the new social media landscape.

On the podcast this week is Michael Barrett, an artist who enjoys experimenting with new technologies and pushing the boundaries of what we expect from art online. We talk about how he’s moved his website to his Micro.blog-hosted site, with a distinctive custom CSS style he built himself.

This week’s guest is Joyce Garcia, an editor with many years of experience in journalism and media. We take a walk down memory lane, discussing the history of online news and blogging, while meandering to such subjects as floppy disks, daisy wheel printers, computer punch cards, and typewriters, eventually getting to the merits of microblogging on Micro.blog.

Our guest this week is Amit Gawande, who codes for a living but lives for reading and writing. He is the creator of Microthreads, a tool for finding users and conversations to follow on Micro.blog. We talk about the many blog platforms he’s used over the years, and why the simplicity of Micro.blog makes it easier to just write.

This week’s guest, Halsted Bernard, has quite a multitude of interests (gaming, linguistics, virtual reality, cooking, fountain pens, quantified self), so it was hard to narrow it down to just a couple for the microcast, but we managed to discuss analog journaling in a digital hangout, her science fiction responsibilities at the library, and her cat Zen.

(Interested in joining the online hangout for analog journaling? Send a mention to @cygnoir!)

This week, our guest is Simon Woods from the UK. He is the creator of the Micro.blog community resource @til, aka Today I Learned. We talk about his life as a citizen of the Internet, which includes blogging, working from home, and cats, of course.

I get a second chance to record in the very cool Airstream podcast studio at XOXO conference, because I ran into Aaron Parecki. He is an organizer at StreamPDX, so he has the keys to the Airstream! Aaron is also one of the founders of the IndieWeb movement, so we talk about IndieWeb, Micro.blog, and the importance of having your own domain to control your content and your internet presence.

This is a special extra edition of Micro Monday, recorded at the XOXO Festival with Doug Beal. The interview was recorded in an Airstream Trailer, the mobile podcast and storytelling studio provided by StreamPDX. It was a fun experience, and I thank Doug for being the guinea pig and doing a live recording on a moment’s notice.

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